As someone who is in the business of football and who has a vested interested in the continued increase of interest in the sport here in the US, it came as some surprise that Bob Ryan of the boston Globe chose to write about the UEFA Champions league final last night. (thanks to Justin for pointing this out).

It was also a nice surprise to see that the article was not aimed at trampling on the global sport – as so often done by the talking heads on WEEI, and other reporters in the paper. Is this a sign that the sport may be approaching some type of tipping point in the mind of the american consumer. Its cleary an uphill battle – our attention for sports is very scarce here given the 4 majors.

It would be nice if we could get the proper name for the sport back.

The beautiful game is football – and it was founded before this country at boarding schools (including mine) in the 16th century. A brief glimpse at wikipedia gives a very enlightening description of the history of both this game and American Football.

taking a brief snippet…..

ModernAmerican footballgrew out of a match betweenMcGill Universityof Montreal, andHarvard Universityin 1874. At the time, Harvard students are reported to have played theBoston Game— arunningcode — rather than the FA-basedkickinggames favored by US universities. This made it easy for Harvard to adapt to the rugby-based game played by McGill and the two teams alternated between their respective sets of rules. Within a few years, however, Harvard had both adopted McGill’s rugby rules and had persuaded other US university teams to do the same. In 1876, at theMassasoit Convention, it was agreed by these universities to adopt most of theRugby Football Unionrules, with some variations. Princeton, Rutgers and others continued to compete using soccer-based rules for a few years before switching to the rugby-based rules of Harvard and its competitors. US colleges did not generally return to soccer until the early twentieth century.